Describe Yourself as a Writer
Writing is a process of getting your thoughts down in paper and the outcome depends on your goals as a writer and your audience. If you are writing for school assignments, then the writing process follows specific objectives and you are writing for your teacher apart from particular readers. As a student, I want to examine how I perform the writing process and its differences across diverse kinds of text. I see myself as a writer who follows a systematic way of writing for my academic work but with greater freedom and creativity when it comes to writing fictional stories.
Writing for school requires a methodology for efficient and effective writing. I start with the assignment instructions and the audience. For instance, when I was asked to write about my views on legalizing prostitution, I conducted research first on the pro’s and con’s of sex work. I detached myself from having a final view because I wanted my opinions to be based on actual studies and the experiences of prostitutes. Going through the research, I encountered a new perspective where prostitutes saw themselves as sex workers who deserve legal protection and social acceptance. They are not exploited but speak from an empowered viewpoint. Seeing sex as a form of service that can be rendered to those who demand them, they lobby for rights and respect. From here, I formed my argument and considered the sex workers’ conditions. The method here is efficient because I focused on my research and created drafts before submitting the final version. I find this approach effective as well as it included real-life experiences from people who actually provide sex work.
The writer in me diverges from the methodical one when writing for fiction because freedom is of utmost importance. Definitely, I still think of my audience and how they would feel. I want them to like my story and the characters. However, there is more me and less of the teacher. My voice will fill up the paper or rather the voices in my head will spread across the paper. I am free to take risks about the characters- who they are to themselves and to different people- and the plot. I can twist the twists many times and change them again. With fictional stories, I have absolute freedom in writing.
Finally, I cherish the creativity of writing because I am a writer who likes new things. They say everything has already been written and that is mostly true. A 100% original work is hard to achieve when so many stories have already been published. At the very least, there must be twists to the old formulas; something new must be injected to become different. I see myself as a writer who views a story like clay, to be formed and shaped as I see fit. My teacher gave me a pen and asked me to write about it and I imagined a psychotic killer owning it before, writing about the horrific murders he performed in the modern setting. I will subsequently find ways of turning the plot into something new, while the characters must be memorable and have riveting lives. The creative process gives me excitement, comparable to the rush one feels when jumping from a cliff and into the blue ocean waves 100 feet below.
I am a writer who can abide by the rules as needed and also break the rules if possible. As a student with specific writing guidelines, I write to achieve the highest grade. But when freedom and creativity are allowed, I will focus on the new, the exhilarating, and the mind-blowing. Writing about fictional stories, boundaries can be pushed and destroyed and rebuilt for some coherence. As a fiction writer, I am freer and more creative, letting my ideas take me wherever they want me to go.
